Sunnyside Uppers’ latest single, “Mary,” journeys down the rabbit hole, embracing an arthouse approach to absurdism and Jurassic Park on the way towards romance. At least, that’s our best guess.
“I actually didn’t understand the storyline until I read his description just now,” admits Sunnyside Uppers’ Ryan Brown. “The video is Gavin’s vision! I gave him an outline of what the song was about and he worked his magic. I was so surprised and delighted when I saw the final version.”
Which seems fair. If someone approaches you with a handful of dinosaurs and enough gumption to produce a music video, the natural inclination is generally to accept.
“The video is a dream Ryan had. The dream is viewed from the inside of a TV where Ryan is both viewer and subject,” says Maclean, though it’s better to imagine this being read in the voice of Werner Herzog.
“In the dream, he confronts old bad habits (the dinos). Searching the city frantically for the girl he just met. The dinos try to convince Ryan that he should keep on doing what he’s doing. Obsessing, fretting, worrying, and making up scenarios that are toxic to moving forward. They try to convince him that he doesn’t have to change to be happy and that it will all work out. The same rut feels comfortable, a known quantity, though it leads to disaster.
“Ryan’s better self appears in the sky as a beacon of hope. Hope that he does change. Tempted by the dinos, led by love and fear. Will Ryan change his ways? Does the Ryan that appears in the sky signal a new path and happy future? Or will the dinos lull him back to a self-destructive paranoid pattern?”
MacLean’s summary is an aptly poetic, albeit a rather paleontological interpretation of Brown’s journey. The story behind Mary takes some digging; one must sift through a few eras of Brown’s life to discover the song’s deeper meaning.
“I’ve always had a tough time fitting in,” begins Brown, settling comfortably an autobiographical repose. “People are often surprised to hear I feel that way because I bury my inner turmoil pretty successfully, but it’s there. I’m a sensitive introvert with ADHD (none of which I understood while growing up) and I always felt like the things I wanted were just out of reach.”
Brown had begun his ascension towards manhood in both a time and place which didn’t quite coincide with either cable TV or internet. As a result, the practical nature of the phrase “don’t have a cow, man” left him perplexed, especially considering his rural upbringing. His relatively weak grasp of pop culture led to frustration and strained relations with other school children. His social skills began to suffer.
“I never quite knew what the other kids were talking about in terms of pop culture (my diet was pretty heavily moderated anyway).,” explains Brown. “Sports weren’t really my thing. I enjoyed playing but didn’t much care if my team won or lost, to the great frustration of everyone else.
“In junior high, I started playing the drums, then the guitar. Music became an escape from my normal life. Something I could obsessively do alone in my room for hours. Though I wasn’t diagnosed until my thirties, a feature of the ADHD brain is that it rejects everything it doesn’t like and really latches onto anything it does. Music gave me focus (I was always a smart kid, got decent grades without trying too hard ‘but he’s always daydreaming’), providing an outlet for both my imagination and the more difficult emotions I didn’t know how to access. Thanks, Kurt.
“Escape became routine. When life got stressful, I’d mentally seal myself off and live in my own head, fantasizing about how great things would be when I got out of my current situation and [event/person/whatever] replaced it. My favourite fantasy was that I’d one day meet someone who understood me completely, we’d fall in love and I’d finally feel OK. As I learned in adulthood, these patterns don’t change until you change them.
“I went to music school in the early ’00s and became severely depressed. Numerous reasons (unhealthy lifestyle, fixed mindset, no coping skills, failing at the wrong version of the thing you love most); it was also before mental health was a mainstream topic of conversation. So I didn’t deal with it, because I didn’t know how.
“Then I moved to Halifax to play in a band. Conditions in my life gradually improved, but it took a very difficult year-long romantic obsession over someone who lived on another continent to finally get me to do anything about my mental state. I’d had an out-of-body experience in a bar, couldn’t stop thinking about it, didn’t talk to anyone until my friends dragged it out of me months later, at which point it had metastasized into an emotional attachment that had to be removed very painfully. Just like a breakup, except it’s not real to anyone else and you can’t explain it. I don’t recommend it. Denial, repression, and compartmentalization work until they don’t. (Did I mention I’m Catholic?)”
And this is, presumably, where the dinosaurs enter the story; his indomitable tormentors. However, like the fire of Prometheus, or a shark with a laser, there was still a possibility that these forces of destruction might be quelled, tamed, and utilized as any other tool.
That, or whatever doesn’t eat you only makes you stronger.
Clearly, Brown has emerged into society more capable than the uncultured bairn he went in as, even if admits to a few missteps along the way.
“This song is about someone I met the following year – moving toward recovery, but definitely not there,” says Brown about how his eventual metamorphosis ultimately amounted to a song. “I didn’t know we’d eventually get married (in fact, I tried to break it off several times in the first few years; it was her tenacity that kept us together). At the time, it was just another lost hope. I was listening to mid-period Beatles and Elliott Smith a lot, which informed the music.
“I’m reluctant to talk about these things because it’s personal, embarrassing, and probably not a great look. I don’t want to get canceled over stuff I didn’t understand when it was happening. But we can’t heal from it if we can’t acknowledge it.”
While both the Beatles and Elliott Smith have regularly been attributed as the cause of many a misspent youth, ambitions of rockstardom, and a melancholic bent, it is this push and pull that makes up the meat of life. Are muscles not built by working them? Must not a fiber be worried to form a rope? Will a Tyrannosaurus Rex once bitten not bite twice as hard? Life finds a way.